Steering Committee update - Sept. 15, 2010

1) Committee Reports

· Staff Development (Amy) – Plans are being finalized for the two Gadget Days, October 18^th at Denison, October 28^th at Oberlin

· Technical Infrastructure Committee (Alan) -- List of hardware and software being updated. Jason from Kenyon will attend next meeting to talk about Drupal, general purpose web content management system. Plans in the works for a meeting to develop best practices for metadata creation in our projects, to be hosted by OWU. Recommendation about how to spend the consortial $40,000 equipment money will be shared later with the Steering Committee.

2) Campus Updates

· OWU – faculty workshop scheduled for October 22^nd – “Mellon Grant Success Stories” – Liaison Dee Peterson and Digital Librarian Emily Haddaway will discuss their collaborative digital project with Professor Anne Sokolsky. Information about how to submit a proposal, expectations of librarians and faculty, etc. will be shared – a “mini kick-off event”

· COW – Digital proposal approved – “Collecting and digitizing farmer interviews in Wayne County, Ohio.” Digital Services Associate has given her notice. Search will be undertaken to replace her.

· Oberlin – Two projects recently approved – “King-Crane Commission”, budget of $4,000. Travel to Library of Congress and other institutions will be involved. “Geological features project” has been approved and funded with a budget of $4,000. Project is being revised. “Hispanic Studies” proposal has been revised, and there is a chance it will be funded at a budget of $2,000.

· Denison – Local steering committee meeting next week. Two possible projects are in the works – Geosciences project to digitize specimens in the department and a Biology project to digitize the university herbarium collection.

· Kenyon – Four approved projects, two involving hiring of students. Working out where students will work and use equipment, tasks, etc. Will scan, possibly write metadata – will depend on the project.

3) Award and Acceptance letters

Ray is concerned that the faculty guidelines do not match the requirements listed in the award and acceptance letters. Following discussion, we agreed that this content would be standard for each college, but the language used in our letters can be modified to best suit the culture of each school. Sample letters from Oberlin and OWU will be sent out at the same time.

4) Interface Specialist

Job description has been reviewed by Technical Infrastructure Committee. Alan asked us to send our comments about the description to him. Hopes to send us a final draft next week. The T.I.Committee will review resumes, select candidates, and interview. After discussion, consensus that the position will be an “open search, internal applicants free to apply,” with one inclusive call for candidates.

Other grant business

Catalina reported an 84% response rate to the technology survey she sent out. Committee asked Catalina to send each of us the names of staff members at our schools who did not complete the survey, hoping to get closer to 100%.

Interim reports from each school and the heads of Staff Development and Technical Infrastructure Committee are due today. Bulleted lists are o.k. Send to both Mark and Susan.

Steering Committee Update - August 31, 2010

• Alan Boyd asked if the infrastructure committee needs additional topics to discuss. Carol Holliger suggested that the infrastructure committee should review the staff survey results.

• Amy Badertscher reported that staff development committee has just received the survey results and has not yet met to discuss them. She reminded the steering committee of the two Gadget Days scheduled for the 18th at Denison and the 28h at Oberlin. The comments from the survey will likely influence the topics discussed and demonstrated during the Gadget Days.
  

• Campus reports included a new proposal at Kenyon. The significant issue for this proposal is the requirement by the faculty member to control the timing of the open publication of the results. After some discussion of this (because the spirit of the Mellon NGL Grant is to have the materials made openly available as soon as possible), the steering committee decided to ask the faculty member to set a date for making the material open, based on the scholarship requirements.
  

• The steering committee discussed the component of grant to encourage open access for scholarly communication. Ray English described the efforts taken to date at Oberlin to encourage and educate faculty on this issue. A long discussion followed, through which it became clear that open access is a large and complicated issue that will take great patience. We reminded ourselves that each campus needs to come up with an approach to address scholarly communication, but that since each campus is at a different point in the understanding and acceptance of open access, each campus plan will be different.
  

Quick Conference Report

I was fortunate to attend the Society of American Archivists Conference in DC this year and wanted to provide a short note on some of the more relevant parts of the conference. A number of the sessions were very informative. The most useful was on the new Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines for still images. In addition to providing a very detailed system for measuring the quality of scans, the guidelines include suggested best practices, and can be a great resource for some of our scanning projects. Another good presentation was about very large digital collections and how to assign metadata giving three different examples of outsourcing, using keyword searching, and grouping multiple objects with one set of metadata. I also got to hear about how web interfaces can be improved through sessions on user studies and better use of search engine optimization.

While the sessions were good, the best part was probably the networking. SAA is a small conference so I had the chance to meet archivists and librarians involved with an assortment of digital projects at the Online Archives of California, JSTOR, New York Public Library, and colleges and universities from across the country. It was really inspiring to learn about all the different digital efforts that are underway, but I can't wait until next year when I can brag about all the projects the Ohio 5 has accomplished!

Steering Cttee Update Aug. 19, 2010

Committee updates

a. Staff Development
Planning is underway for the ‘gadget days’ tentatively scheduled for Oct. 18 at Denison and Oct. 28 at Oberlin (October breaks for those schools, so better facilities and parking available). The committee is meeting by conference calls and details will soon follow re. the October events.
b. Technical Infrastructure – Alan is on vacation, so there’s nothing new to report at the moment.

Institution updates
a. Denison – Three projects have been approved and work began this summer. They are from Black Studies, Theater, and Women’s Studies. One more from Geosciences is in preparation. After the Denison Selection Committee re-convenes in early September, Scottie will send the letters and acceptance forms to current grant recipients.
b. Kenyon – Five projects have been approved. Letters and agreement forms were sent out to the grant recipients. All were signed and returned. Work will start with the Fall semester.
c. Oberlin – Two projects have been awarded grants, one processing the archives of former Oberlin President King who chaired a commission for U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, and the other from Geology wherein images of geological features will be processed. Work will begin after the semester starts. Ray will send the award letters and acceptance forms to recipients soon.
d. OWU – They are on track with a link for the grant on their home page. Two projects were done in 2009 as trial projects – 1) the “Krempley Gender Project” -- travel images from professor’s private collection will be used to elicit response from students in Humanities Classics 226 , selected by student (Krempley) as independent study project. 2)“Auxin Transport During Gravitropism and Phototropism using a GFP-based Biosensor“– to be used in Biology/Microbiology 120 (Intro to Cell Biology). Three summer “pilot” projects were approved in May by the NGL Campus Committee and are currently in process -- 1)“Tree Growth data for the Bohannan and Kraus Ecological Preserves” (Botany/Microbiology professor Laurel Anderson and liaison Deb Peoples) 4)”Contemporary Issues in Media Law Podcast”(Journalism professor Melinda Rhodes and liaison Kristine Kinzer) 5)”Digital Resources for the Teaching of the History of the Book” (English professor Patricia DeMarco and liaison Bernard Derr).
e. COW – The first proposal is almost ready for review. It is an oral history project from environmental studies regarding the history of dairy farms in the local area.
Update on the staffing survey
Catalina reported that few responses have been received, but she will send a reminder soon and follow through.

2-year timeline in grant proposal
Mark noted that we are behind schedule. See the timeline he sent via e-mail and see how we can move along more quickly. Catalina has discussed this at COW and she will meet shortly with Kenyon about it and the assessment plan. Note that a detailed assessment plan is part of our responsibility. Ron will work on getting this completed with Catalina’s help.
The Scholarly Communication component needs to be addressed. Oberlin has long been working on this, and Denison will start this Fall. Scottie meets with the Provost today and has invited Ray to give an open talk on the topic November 4th followed by a meeting of the Library Advisory Committee. Summer of 2010 was supposed to be focused on library staff and Summer of 2011 was to focus on faculty. The directors need to discuss how to move forward as a group on this topic.
Interim reports are due September 15th to Mark. LOOK at the timeline and prepare your report accordingly.
"Hardware and software" ($40,000) in grant budget - how do we want to spend this money?
We will ask Alan to discuss this on the next call. Ray will alert Alan about this.

About Scheduling

Next week I'll finish my introductory visits to each of the colleges, which means I'll have even more projects to start on. I'm trying to balance hours spent working for each school while still making sure that every project reaches a timely and successful outcome. For now I'm focusing on projects that are already underway or those with a timeline that starts this summer, but if you're ready to begin a project, want my input, or are just feeling a little neglected please don't hesitate to contact to me. Email is always best at caoyler@gmail.com.

I'm also tracking when I'm on the road, and you can see when I'll be visiting your school through the NGL calendar at https://sites.google.com/site/oh5nextgenerationlibrary/Home/calendar-1. If you want to add a visit to the calendar just let me know and we can set something up.

Steering Committee Update--August 3

• Staff development committee will meet this week to discuss the next event.
  
• Technical Infrastructure Committee is looking into project sharing venues or tools.
• Denison has a one additional proposal for a potential grant.
• We discussed posting the grant proposals on campus websites as well as on our NGL website. All agreed this was reasonable.
  
• We are working on interim reports for the Mellon Grant reviewing the time line and the activities over the first 8 months of the grant. These reports are due Sept 15 and should be sent to Mark and Susan.
  
• Catalina is preparing to send out the all staff survey. She would like all emails from each institution to track results.
• Constor update. The project is underway. Both Denison and Oberlin have made progress with decisions and boxing up materials for recycle or return to home institution.

July Update

Hard to believe, it's already been a month since I joined the Five Colleges! I want to thank everyone for making me feel welcome and helping me get rolling on the many projects going on. I've settled in at Oberlin now and have had successful day trips to visit Kenyon and Denison, and I hope to see Wooster and Wesleyan soon. A lot of my time in July was spent just learning how everything works here and familiarizing myself with past projects and new technology. But also have been working on three projects in particular.

The first is Denison's digitization of government documents about WWII Japanese American internment camps. This project began some time ago, and digital scans of 30 documents were created and saved, unfortunately, the project was never completed and the digital documents aren't publicly available. I'm currently sorting out what has been scanned, checking or creating a new OCR scan for full text searching, and setting up a home for them, probably in the DRC.

Another Denison project I'm working on is "Writing Our Story: An Analysis of Black Student Protest as Denison University." This NGL proposal already has scanning of documents underway, so I've focused on selecting metadata elements and setting up a process to easily record metadata.

At Oberlin I've been working on the institutional repository, the Oberlin Scholarship collection. This collection has been set up on the DRC and has had a number of test items added successfully, what I'm working on is finding a workflow for batch uploads and making improvements to the web design.

These projects received my attention in July as it was easy to join in what had already been started, and they are giving me a chance to become more familiar with the DRC and other tools I'll be using frequently. If anyone else has project they'd like me to get going on now, please let me know- I can be reached by email at caoyler@gmail.com or phone 440-775-6490.